Postcards from Brussels

A bourgeois city gone to seed

The Sint-Jans-Molenbeek district: Brussels, the ‘sepulchral city’, as Conrad called it in Heart of Darkness, is, says Dalrymple, ‘dirty and unswept’; the houses, once all ‘bourgeois pride and prosperity’, are neglected

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Degeneration: ‘despite the fact that the public sector accounts for 50% of GDP, Brussels remains dirty and uncared for’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cretinism: ‘many of the buildings were defaced by graffiti, the architectural equivalent of tattoos and as idiotically egotistic’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An architectural ‘mishmash’, says Dalrymple, but he would surely acknowledge that this is part of the charm of Brussels

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Palais des Beaux-Arts (Paleis voor Schone Kunsten), Victor Horta, 1928: ‘the ugliest of all the world’s major art galleries, a building in the fascist style but without the courage of its megalomania, designed as if by a pocket Albert Speer’

Detestable petit-bourgeois attitudes

For more than 150 years, bourgeois respectability has been under concerted and rarely contradicted literary and intellectual attack, Dalrymple writes. The striving for respectability of the petite bourgeoisie is viewed as

not merely dull, but hypocritical and immoral. Better outright egotism than such hypocrisy, for at least egotism is sincere. Do what you like because, underneath a veneer of righteousness, that is what everyone does anyway. Riches being extracted solely by exploitation of the poor, the morality of the rich is only a smokescreen for their depredations. Besides, morality is a bore: it cramps one’s style.